One of our backers recently asked:

"Are you going to give an outline of the dialect in the book or even transcribe the conversations along with their standard Finnish and English translations?"

That is a great question! It is a bit hard to say what exactly will be in the book. We are excited to see what Rauma has in store for us, and from our experiences the book will come together.

We can imagine giving a short summary of the communities we will work with (recent immigrants and Rauma Dialect speakers, which may include information on the dialect) in the book. You can also expect to read our artist statement and perhaps a little bio. of us, but, honestly that might be where the traditional text ends and the art begins.

We are working directly with a linguist that specializes in the Rauma dialect, so we may pull in some linguistic notation (syntax trees or phonological systems) of the dialect as aesthetic elements. But for our purpose, it is an art book looking at the sounds, stories, and people rather than an academic analysis of the language

We will have the audio CD (which is included with the book) of the Rauma dialect interviews translated into English. Since translation fees are so expensive, we will probably be relying on volunteers to help us, and it may be too much to ask for someone to transcribe all the interviews. Perhaps we will find an enthusiastic volunteer who would be willing to transcribe them or raise enough funds to pay for it, but at this point, we will be ecstatic if we can raise the initial $3500 so that the book can be made.

Please keep the questions coming!

Ron and Mackenzie

To all of those who have already pledged, thank you for your support. Unfortunately we have been getting complaints from some of our potential backers that Amazon is giving them troubles and so on. So, we thought we would post this email from the Kickstarter support staff. With any luck this will help you out:

Hi Ron and Mackenzie!

So sorry for the trouble people are encountering. Anybody having an issue is absolutely welcome to contact me directly -- I can walk them through the process and my response time is quick. Here's a little cheat sheet that may help them out in the meantime, though:

- It is best to create a Kickstarter account prior to proceeding to your project page.
- After creating an account, they can go to your project page and click the green button that says "Back This Project"
- They will then be taken to a page where they will be asked to manually enter the amount they wish to donate and the reward tier they wish to receive (if any). They will then press a blue button at the bottom of the page that says "Proceed to Amazon"
- Once at Amazon, they will be asked to either create a new Amazon Payments account or login with their existing one. They will have to complete this ENTIRE PROCESS in order to register their pledge.

It's brief, but you'll be surprised at how effective it can be in resolving confusion. :)

Hope that helps folks out!

We just got a new article posted on Wandering Educators. Check it out!

http://www.wanderingeducators.com/artisans/lives-artists/art-finland-made-americans.html

As you can see from our Kickstarter page, we are almost at the half way point! With a little more hard work, we think we can fund our book.

This month will mark the end of our grant writing efforts for the projects themselves. To cover expenses like the flights, travel within Finland, and additional art materials, we submitted a grant to the American Scandinavian Foundation, and just yesterday we submitted our project to the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and by the end of this month we will submit our last two grant proposals for the NYSCA Strategic Opportunities Stipend and the Finlandia Foundation. We hope that out of four grants, at least one is bound to stick, but we also realize that the competition is stiff.

We have some great news regarding our in-kind support. PlanFinland (a subsidiary of Plan International) is working hard to find a variety of participants for our recent immigrant project and may even help us with exhibitions. Dr. Tommi Kurki, a linguist and an expert in the South West dialects of Finland at the University of Turku, has offered to be an advisor for the Rauma Dialect project, and last but not least the US Embassy based in Helsinki has written us to express their interest. They would like to meet with us when we get to Finland to talk more in detail about our activities. We look forward to any opportunity that may arise from this interaction.

Look forward to our next post where we will detail more about the Rauma Dialect Project.

Now that our Kickstarter project is taking off we want to give you some more details about one of our projects and the method we hope to use to complete it.

The first project that we are planning to complete at the residency will be called "Repositioning Nostalgia". We will focus on the nostalgic feelings that result from moving to a new country. We will visit the homes of immigrants and locals to photograph objects they have self-selected and identify with (i.e.. a decoration, a memento, or a family heirloom). We are interested in the objects that people have brought with them to make them feel "at home" and in the objects that local Finns identify as "Finnish". We will also interview the participants using an MP3 recorder regarding their selection and the object’s history. We are particularly excited about this project because PlanFinland, a large international foundation that helps immigrants in Finland, has offered to help us find participants and language support!

After the interviews, we will host community conversations at our studio space in Rauma where participants can view all the photographs. We will ask guests, upon viewing, to physically rearrange the photographs so that “similar” objects, one immigrant and one local respectively, create a diptych. Loosely inspired by cultural anthropology, we want participants to create their own criteria, such as color, size, or shape to define “similar”. We hope the diptychs will capture the similarities between objects, although they are from different cultures.

Our goal is to create our own collages inspired by the objects, our interaction with participants, and our experience as Americans in Finland. Although the content for the collages are still evolving, we imagine that we could paint or draw directly onto the photographs or digitally alter the images by adding elements of Rauman lace or imagery from the UNESCO “old town”. The final Rauman collages will incorporate the participant’s images along with our artistic interpretation. All of these items will find their way into the book we want to make.

In the next few days we will post more information about the Rauma Dialect project.

When you have a moment, watch our project covered by the local news! It has a commercial in the beginning, sorry about that!
News 10 Now Story

First we wanted to say thank you to all of the people who have already supported our project. We had an exciting opportunity today where the local TV station came to our house to learn more about Kickstarer and feature our project. Once we get the link we will post it here. Just to say happy holidays please enjoy the Helsinki Mobile Phone Orchestra playing Christmas Bells

http://www.youtube.com/watch...